NDCA

Hearing tonight on radar safety

Two studies have found no public health risks

Cape Cod Times

By George Brennan

gbrennan@capecodonline.com

July 15, 2008 6:00 AM

No public health risks linked to PAVE PAWS.

BOURNE — The public will have a chance tonight to comment on recent studies that conclude PAVE PAWS, an Air Force radar station, poses no health risks to Cape Codders.

The studies, already released publicly, are summarized in the draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, which will be presented at 7 tonight at the Best Western in Bourne. Residents will be given two minutes each to comment on the findings, which critics have said are flawed. Written comments will be accepted through Aug. 4.

Last December, a state Department of Public Health study concluded it was unlikely that PAVE PAWS was the main cause of 14 local cases of Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer, since 1982. Another study by Broadcast Signal Lab in 2005, which did not look at the Ewing’s cases, also concluded there was no risk to public health.

The two studies were prompted by concerns, primarily from parents of children with cancer, raised at public meetings in 2001 and 2002. At the time, the Air Force was proposing an upgrade to the radar station, Air Force environmental planner Lynne Neuman said yesterday.

“Out of those meetings, we found the public wasn’t concerned with the component upgrade, but with the radiofrequency energy and the potential health impacts with those emissions,” she said.

PAVE PAWS, operated by Air Force Space Command, scans the eastern skies for missiles, satellites and space debris. The Sagamore radar station has been in operation since the late 1970s and for nearly as long there have been concerns raised about radiation and the possible health risks associated with exposure to it.

“We’re very confident, and I think the public is confident as well, that these studies have answered their questions,” Lt. Col. Paul Legendre, an environmental engineer with the Air Force, said yesterday.

If you go

A public hearing is scheduled from 7 to 10 tonight at the Best Western, 100 Trowbridge Road, Bourne.

Written comments can be made to Lynne Neuman by e-mail at Lynne.Neuman@Peterson.af.mil; by fax at 719-554-3849; or by mail at HQ AFSPC/A4/7PP, 150 Vandenberg St., Suite 1105, Peterson AFB, CO 80914-2370.

PAVE PAWS draft EIS draws two comments

July 16, 2008 6:00 AM

BOURNE — One critical comment and another in support, that’s all a draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement on PAVE PAWS generated at a public hearing last night.

Bernard Young, whose daughter died from Ewing’s sarcoma in January, said the results of health studies summarized by the Air Force report are flawed. Specifically, he said, data collected does not properly report peak emissions from the radar station. He called the conclusions of the impact statement disappointing.

Wayne Sellin, who served on the PAVE PAWS steering group, said the measurement standards used were “superb.”

Last December, a state Department of Public Health study concluded it was unlikely that PAVE PAWS was the main cause of 14 local cases of Ewing’s sarcoma since 1982. Ewing’s sarcoma is a rare bone cancer.

PAVE PAWS, on the Massachusetts Military Reservation near Sagamore, scans the eastern skies for missiles, satellites and space debris.

Written comments on the environmental impact statement will be accepted through Aug. 4. They should be addressed to: HQ AFSPC/A4/7PP, Attn: Lynne Neuman, 150 Vandenberg St., Suite 1105, Peterson AFB, CO 80914-2370.

— GEORGE BRENNAN

July 18, 2008

Hopewell residents meet to discuss Superfund site progress

Hundreds of residents packed a meeting Thursday night in which the EPA discussed the ongoing plans for the Hopewell Precision Superfund site.

Debra Hall is a resident and active proponent of installing a system to bring water from the Little Switzerland area to the homes in the affected area, rather than make those residents rely on contaminated well water.

Affected areas are near Ryan Drive, Creamery Road, Clove Branch Road and Old Farm Road.

She said she’s satisfied with the way the EPA has been handling the situation.

“The EPA’s been very good,” she said Friday morning. “I even got up and said that at the meeting.”

Hopewell Junction residents have been plagued by trichloroethylene, or TCE, a chemical the Hopewell Precision plant dumped into the ground during the 1970s.

Some people who were exposed to TCE have been diagnosed with cancer, kidney and liver damage and other illnesses.

By TIM HUBER 06.09.08, 4:28 PM ET
Associated Press
CHARLESTON, W.Va. - DuPont is planning a detailed study looking at why workers at a West Virginia plant appear to be getting a rare form of cancer at a higher rate than normal.

The study DuPont (nyse: Stocks: DD - Company News) hopes to start this summer is designed to help determine whether anything at the Washington Works plant near Parkersburg is causing carcinoid tumors, company epidemiologist Morel Symons said Monday. Early work suggests there are more cases than would be expected at the plant, he said.
Continue Reading »

By By BETSY TAYLOR / The Associated Press

May 29, 2008 | 10:21 p.m. CST

ST. LOUIS — Baby teeth collected in St. Louis in the 1950s and ’60s to measure children’s exposure to atomic bomb fallout will be used in a new study to try to gauge if Cold War bomb testing increased cancer risk.

The new study became possible after an estimated 85,000 baby teeth were discovered in storage in 2001. They were leftover contributions to the St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey, and about 300 of them will be tested as part of the new research.
Continue Reading »

April 17, 2008 4:15PM

The Kind of Story I Wish Was Fiction

By Alexis Glick

Remember that book that I told you I was reading over vacation — The Appeal by John Grisham? The story about a cancer cluster caused by a plant that was dumping toxic waste in the ground and throughout the water system? The class action suit filed against a publicly-traded company?

This morning, I interviewed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio, both very well known lawyers. Kennedy, a big defender of the environment and considered a trailblazer for his fight to help clean up the Hudson River. Papantonio, a partner at one of the largest plaintiffs’ law firms in the country.

They came on the show to talk about a class action lawsuit that they filed on April 11th against Raytheon (RTN: 64.71, +0.13, +0.20%), a huge defense and aerospace systems supplier. The lawsuit concerns a facility in St. Petersburg, Fla. which residents believe has released toxins into the water and its neighboring environment. The toxic chemicals — trichloroethylene, vinyl chloride and dioxane — are all believed to be responsible for cancer, birth defects and death. It’s a very sad story about what has happened to this area in Florida. The damages are estimated to be between $250 and $400 million. The case could take two years to settle.

April 24, 2008

Cause of cancer clusters often never discovered

Toxins generally cause rare forms of disease

By HIRAN RATNAYAKE
The News Journal

Genuine cancer clusters account for only a small number of suspected clusters, said Tim Aldrich, an epidemiologist who has studied disease clusters across the nation for three decades.

And even in those cases, the actual cause of a cluster often is never discovered.

One of the best-known cases of a bona fide cancer cluster, Aldrich said, occurred in the mid-1990s at Toms River, N.J., where there appeared to be pediatric cancer clustering. Toms River is adjacent to two “Superfund” sites, designated as high priorities for cleanup by the Environmental Protection Agency because of the presence of hazardous waste.

A study over several years concluded that no single risk factor was responsible for the elevated level of childhood cancer in that region.

Environmental toxins generally cause a specific, rare cancer, experts say. Vinyl chloride monomer, for example, has been found to elevate the risk of hepatic angiosarcoma, a rare liver cancer.

“We tell students common things happen commonly and rare things happen rarely,” said Aldrich, an associate professor of epidemiology at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tenn.

“The meaningful clusters are the result of something really bizarre and very strange becoming more common.”

The eight areas in Delaware identified by the state’s Division of Public Health as having cancer clusters do not show a cluster of any rare cancers. The clusters identified include prostate, lung, colorectal and all cancers.

The next step in Delaware, Aldrich said, is to monitor the region for the next three to five years.

“You want to just keep watching the community to see if something changes,” he said.

When clusters warrant increased surveillance, local universities typically apply for grants to do further study. Ideally, researchers want to compare the population with the cluster to a similar community to see if something sticks out.

“Sometimes you never figure out what it is,” Aldrich said.

Dr. Jaime Rivera, director of the Delaware’s public health division, said it would cost millions of dollars to do an in-depth study of the environmental factors.

People who live in poor socioeconomic areas where a cluster appears may actually have higher cancer rates because of other risk factors. People in poverty are more likely to live near power plants. But they’re also more likely than the general population to smoke and be obese and in worse physical shape.

All those are risk factors for cancer, said Dr. Michael J. Thun, vice president for epidemiology and surveillance research at the American Cancer Society.

“It’s always the case that cancer rates are distributed unevenly,” he said, “and almost always, they relate strongly to socioeconomic factors.”

Another difficulty in making the link is that cancer risks from environmental causes take several years to make their effect apparent. Cancer in the colon, Aldrich said, “isn’t going to go from a pinhead size to a golf ball size in less than five years.”

Eight cancer clusters discovered in Delaware

10 percent to 45 percent more cases in those areas than rest of state, study finds

By CRIS BARRISH • The News Journal • April 24, 2008

Residents of eight areas in Delaware get cancer at abnormally high rates, state public health officials concluded in a study to be made public today.

The cancer clusters comprise large swaths of Delaware’s landscape, upstate from Wilmington to New Castle and from Bear to Glasgow and Middletown, as well as Kenton and Millsboro downstate. Roughly four in 10 Delawareans live in areas with cancer clusters, according to the findings.

Though Delaware residents have long gotten cancer and died from it at rates above the national average, the new study is the first statewide look for pockets of Delaware’s second-leading killer behind heart disease.

Cancer incidence — the rate at which victims get the disease — was 10 percent to 45 percent higher in those regions than the average for the entire state. Some clusters were identified only for specific types of cancer — prostate, lung or colorectal — but five of the areas exhibited clusters of “all cancer combined.” The cases studied were diagnosed between 2000 and 2004, the most recent period for which reliable state data is available.

The report, which has been given to all 62 members of the General Assembly, grew out of a study last summer that focused on several ZIP codes around the Indian River electricity plant near Millsboro, and discovered a lung cancer cluster. A public outcry followed the report, blaming pollution from the coal-powered plant, and some residents speculated that other areas also had clusters. So state officials decided to see if more clusters existed.

The report released today makes no attempt to identify the causes of the clusters. It said possible causes include environmental pollution along with smoking and other unhealthy lifestyle choices. Another factor could be that doctors have diagnosed more cases of cancer because of better patient access to screening. There is a small chance that the findings could be due to coincidence.

No surprise

Though Delaware has long had a reputation as a place to get and die from cancer, Dr. Jaime Rivera, secretary of the Division of Public Health, urged residents not to overreact to the findings.

“I’m neither alarmed nor surprised. The results were not unexpected,” Rivera told The News Journal after a reporter reviewed a copy of the report. “Any time you look at a large area for incidence, you are going to find areas that have a few more than others. But the findings always throw up a yellow flag to look further into what might be the cause.”

Gov. Ruth Ann Minner, who has made the cancer battle a focus of her two terms, echoed Rivera.

“There’s nothing in the report anybody needs to be alarmed about. There are some areas a little higher than others in Delaware, especially where people have moved from other states and retired here. It isn’t all of Delaware.”

The report noted that cancers take up to 40 years to develop, and those who recently moved to Delaware likely didn’t contract the disease here.

But just as the Millsboro-area findings led activists and residents to suspect pollution as the main culprit, so did the new report.

Sen. David McBride, a Democrat who represents the Hares Corner and Wilmington Manor areas — part of the New Castle region, with inflated rates of lung cancer, prostate cancer and all cancers combined — said he suspects the high rates stem from the area’s history as a “dumping ground” for chemical plants and other heavy industry.

“I’m highly concerned,” said McBride, who hadn’t yet read the report. “If in fact those clusters are showing up in these areas, I want to know what we’re going to do about it.”

Rivera said public health officials will soon be briefing state legislators and working with lawmakers to arrange meetings in communities where clusters were found.

Input will be sought from Minner’s Delaware Consortium of state officials, health professionals, civic leaders and activists. If appropriate, formal epidemiological studies will be conducted in affected areas; one is now being conducted in the Millsboro area, where cancer victims and their families are being interviewed to evaluate how they might have contracted the disease.

McBride, a consortium member,
said he definitely will hold community meetings about the cancer findings. “You can underline that. The residents will expect me to be their voice in this matter.”

27 areas studied

To look for clusters, researchers divided Delaware into 27 areas with populations from about 6,000 to 84,000. The state only studied incidence of the four most frequent cancer types — lung, colorectal, prostate and breast — as well as “all cancer combined.” The rates are age-adjusted to account for the fact that people get cancer more frequently as they age.

Studying smaller tracts, such as a section of Wilmington, was ruled out because scientific analysis is unreliable when there are too few cases of cancer. Instead the study focused on County Census Divisions, groups of adjoining census tracts.

In recent months, the state denied The News Journal’s requests for its cancer data — which officials had provided in 2001 and 2003 — denying the newspaper the ability to conduct its own study of cancer incidence. A 2004 newspaper series on Delaware’s high cancer death rate, especially among the poor, led state lawmakers to allocate several million dollars to Minner’s proposal for cancer screening and treatment programs for the uninsured.

Rivera’s office, meanwhile, spent several months conducting its own study.

Some of the findings:

•The Middletown-Odessa census division, which runs from the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal almost to the Kent County line, and has about 41,000 people, had a colorectal cancer rate 44.8 percent above the state average.

•The Kenton area near Dover, home to about 6,000 people, was 22.4 percent above average for all cancer cases.

•The city of Wilmington, with 72,000 people, was 10 percent above average for all cancers, 21.1 percent above average for prostate cancer and 17.5 percent above average for lung cancer.

•The Millsboro area had a lung cancer rate 29.8 percent above average.

Kim Furtado, a naturopathic practitioner who had led the fight to convince state officials to conduct the initial study around the Indian River plant, said she expected the state to find such clusters.

“If we refuse to look, we’ll never find,” Furtado said. “This is the cutting edge of what a public health department is supposed to do. So this is an excellent first step, to understand the depth and breadth of the problem. Now we need to roll up our sleeves.”

Jay Cooperson, chairman of the Sierra Club environmental group in Delaware, said members of his group would be itching to study the report but said his initial reaction was that the amount of cancer clusters is “a pretty shockingly high number.”

Rivera said that while the state cannot pin the high incidence on environmental causes, the impact of pollution on communities “goes beyond these cancers” to respiratory disorders, allergies and other ailments.

“By no means does this let industries off the hook, chemical companies off the hook,” Rivera said.

He also cautioned residents and activists to be aware that like pollution, behaviors can increase cancer risk.

“We’re seeing an increase in lung cancer, which is overwhelmingly the result of tobacco exposure. Delawareans need to avoid tobacco,” Rivera said.

Minner, who leaves office in January, said she will continue to battle the disease over the remaining months of her tenure.

“This report is just part of what we really need to know,” she said. “We’ll continue to work on this.”

Staff reporter Mike Chalmers contributed to this story. Contact senior reporter Cris Barrish at 324-2785 or cbarrish@delawareonline.com.

Connecticut Post

Milford site cleanup being mapped out

FRANK JULIANO

Article Last Updated: 04/26/2008 11:34:01 PM EDT

MILFORD — Nearly five years after a toxic chemical was reported in the groundwater and soil of an industrial site here, state officials and representatives of four affected companies discussed cleanup plans last week.

But that is little comfort to Debbie Smith, of Ansonia, who believes that her husband, Ed, was at least the second construction worker at the Milford Power Co. site to die of cancer linked to exposure to the chemical.

The conference call Tuesday that included state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal; Graham Stevens, the brownfields coordinator for the state Department of Environmental Protection, and the property owners did not set any timetable for removing the trichloroethylene, or TCE.

Stevens said the four companies: Bic Corp., Milford Power Co., Jordan Realty and Gas Equipment Engineering, are working on their Phase III environmental studies, which detail exactly where on their property the once-commonly used solvent is, and suggest methods to remove it.

A fifth company, Northeast Electronics Corp., is not part of the partial consent order that Blumenthal won in court in 2005, but is engaged in a separate TCE cleanup overseen by federal officials.

“Northeast Electronics has completed much of its Phase III, and this department has already accepted Bic’s study,” Stevens said.

A “hot spot” of known soil contamination on Shelland Street leading into the Milford Power Co. facility has already been remediated, the DEP official said, as has the soil under four buildings at the nearby Caswell Cove Condominiums.

“There were 8,400 tons of impacted soil removed from the area of concern on Shelland Street that were taken to an approved landfill, most likely out of state,” he said.

Debbie Smith said that her husband got very sick working on the power plant construction, developing a large tumor in his neck that turned out to be a very aggressive cancer.

Neil Clifford, the blasting contractor on the power plant construction, died in 2005 of a rare form of cancer that he believed was caused by exposure to TCE. He had undergone a bone marrow transplant in an effort to battle the disease.

Joe Ambrosini, the business manager of Laborers Local 665, said union members suspect that Ed Smith’s cancer was also caused by work-related exposure to TCE. “We’ve always kind of speculated among ourselves; Ed had throat cancer, which isn’t usual.”

In fact, his widow said, Ed Smith didn’t smoke and had no family history of cancer. Smith died last May 9 at age 55.

“He was the first one on the Milford Power job and the last to leave it. My husband really suffered,” Debbie Smith said. “He had two operations and after the second one he lost the ability to speak. He had to be fed through a tube in his stomach. But he wanted to live and he was willing to try whatever treatments they had.”

But Ed Smith was denied workers’ compensation benefits, his widow said, because he had worked at so many construction sites over the years.

“We had a hearing in New Haven and they denied us 3-2 because Ed had also worked on the Raymark site in Stratford, which was contaminated,” she said. “They told us they couldn’t determine whether, if he got it from the job, which job it was.”

Clifford, Smith and other workers would get soaked by the contaminated water, which collected in ponds and sprayed up after blasting, the men’s families said.

Although the DEP doesn’t certify any job site as safe, Stevens said that Bic Corp. officials paid for their facilities to be checked and determined that they were safe for workers. The company has since moved much of its manufacturing to Shelton.

“Bic filed its Phase III report in January,” spokeswoman Linda Kwong said. “Bic will continue to work with the DEP until this investigation is completed and is committed to doing all that is necessary and reasonable as a long-standing, responsible neighbor to provide assurances about the safety of Bic’s manufacturing operations.”

State and city health department officials checked the Milford Power Co. plant itself when construction was completed.

The point of origin seems to be the Jordan Realty Co. property on Bic Drive, where “hot spots” of up to 60,000 parts per billion of the industrial solvent, a suspected carcinogen, were measured, officials say.

The TCE was discovered in 1999 by an environmental analyst hired by the Milford Power Co., which had purchased a portion of the Jordan Realty site to build the 544-megawatt generating plant. But DEP officials at the time failed to follow up on the report, and it wasn’t discovered until 2003 when workers contacted the Connecticut Post.

House Speaker James A. Amann, D-Milford, who lives at Caswell Cove, and then-Sen. Winthrop S. Smith Jr. later pushed through a notification bill that requires that workers be told of any job site contamination.

Debbie Smith said she knows that much has been done to address the problem, but that she still worries about worker safety, especially as her son, Jeremy Smith, 21, begins his career as a laborer with Local 665. “I’m worried about him, sure, but they are being a lot more careful than they were years ago,” she said.

Boston GLOBE EDITORIAL

Disease cluster mystery

October 14, 2007

FOR MORE than 20 years, health officials have known about a puzzling concentration of the neurodegenerative illness known as Lou Gehrig’s disease in the southeastern Massachusetts town of Middleborough. In the coming months, a study financed by the federal government and conducted by state environmental health scientists might answer the riddle of whether toxic waste from two Superfund sites in the town has caused the rare and usually fatal disease, which normally strikes just two of 100,000 people.

The state is also working to create a registry to keep track of the disease. In collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Environmental Health Tracking Program, such registries can build up the databases that researchers need to track diseases with suspected environmental causes. Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton of New York and Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah have called for a $100 million increase in the CDC program’s budget to help the tracking program establish itself nationwide. Congress should approve the funding.

Besides being a potential site for a casino operated by the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, Middleborough was home to a metal plating plant and a chemical plant. Their industrial waste became Superfund sites that still have not been entirely cleaned up.

The two best-known victims of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) have been Gehrig, the baseball Hall of Famer who died of it, and the physicist Stephen Hawking, who has defied the odds by surviving with the disease for decades. Most of those afflicted die within two to four years. The disease deprives patients of the ability to control motion, speech, and finally breathing, although their minds remain clear. Besides environmental factors, scientists are also exploring genes and viruses as possible causes.

Researchers have studied other ALS clusters. Three men who played football for the San Francisco 49ers in 1964 were diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s. A possible cause was a fertilizer with high levels of the heavy metal cadmium that was used on the team’s practice field. Residents of the western Pacific island of Guam have also had abnormally high rates of the disease. A possible trigger there was an edible bean, the cycad.

The CDC program for tracking environmental links to diseases was spurred by a 2001 Pew Environmental Health Commission report calling for such an effort. The program offers the prospect of integrating, under uniform data standards, the toxic monitoring and health surveillance efforts of a myriad of state agencies. Especially in the case of low-incidence diseases like Lou Gehrig’s, such a nationwide tracking system could be of great benefit to scientists in identifying concentrations and pointing to causes. Congress should give the project the support it needs.